Alan Kelly surprised at White comments about Joan Burton

A Labour Minister has said he was "very surprised" at comments by Alex White that the party cannot afford to delay generational change by choosing Joan Burton, the "last woman standing" from the Rainbow Coalition, as its new leader.

Alan Kelly, who is running for the Labour deputy leadership, said Mr White had not repeated the remarks since first making the claim at a party hustings in Cork last week.

Mr White and Ms Burton are competing to be next Labour leader, and Mr Kelly has declared his support for the Minister for Social Protection.

“I was very surprised by the comments,” Mr Kelly said, adding that they “haven’t been echoed again since, so maybe Alex has reflected on them”.

“I don’t think they were overtly ageist. They were probably comments based on a competitive streak in Alex.”

Mr Kelly was speaking at the launch of a €1 million grant scheme to encourage more taxi drivers to make their cars wheelchair-accessible.

Stephen Cluskey, founder of wheelchairtaxi.ie, said he realised something had to be done about the shortage of accessible taxis after being “stranded” at the side of a Dublin city centre street for four hours when a taxi he had booked failed to show up.

Mr Cluskey said the incident a number of years ago saw him left sitting in his chair from 2am to 6am. He claimed there had been a 40 per cent drop in the number of accessible taxis over the past two to three years.

There is a €10,000 price difference between wheelchair-friendly taxis and normal saloon cars.

“This is a great first step to at least stopping the haemorrhaging of those numbers and will go a long way to boosting them again,” Mr Cluskey said.

“Lowering the regulations, bringing the cheaper types of vehicles into the market is a brilliant first step and should make it very attractive to drivers to get into the wheelchair taxi industry.”